


Living with our ghosts

by LadyLys



Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Haruno Sakura, Dango, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Mama Bear Haruno Sakura, Protective Haruno Sakura, Very polite haunting, What to do when you are being haunted by your dead relatives, no beta we die like men, supportive Itachi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25269940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLys/pseuds/LadyLys
Summary: The practical guide on what do you do when you start hallucinating entire conversations with dead family members in the hope that they are not truly the dearly departed souls of your acquired relatives.Or, Sakura is probably being haunted by the Uchiha. But it's still a good excuse to have a chat with Itachi while they drink some tea and eat a plate of dango.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Itachi, Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sarada, Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Itachi (if you squint), Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke (Mentioned)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 180





	Living with our ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> I always felt that Sakura was done a great disservice with the ending, much more than any other character. I almost felt as if she was a real person and not a character, and Kishi really really did her dirty. 
> 
> So here's me trying to deal with that in an attempt to keep up with the botched canon that we have. Our girl deserved better, but Sarada's a cutie and we love her (and it's not her fault that her dad has been a raging and flaming arsehole). Hence the Sasusaku: it is mentioned and they still are legally married, (even if at this point I'd like to bitchslap him into the future). 
> 
> Itachi's along for the ride because 1) he'd love his niece to death, 2) I'd always thought that he and Sakura could get along really well if they had the possibility to do so (and I always had a soft spot for Itasaku, but this can absolutely be read as Gen if you'd rather do that).
> 
> This had started as an angst-fest but then thankfully my brain short-circuited and poor Sakura had some opportunity to live all this with some sort of levity. Plus, snarky Sakura is snarky.
> 
> Please note that this is unbeta'd and that it's my first work in a geologic era or so. Enjoy.

_So_. What do you do when you start hallucinating entire conversations with the members of the family you married into? Were they truly hallucinations; were they some sort of lucid dreams? Or was she truly conversing with the dearly departed members of a long-gone family? Was she being haunted in some way shape or form?

She harrumphed and stretched her hand to grasp a stick of sticky dango. In her other hand, she held a steaming cup of tea. The air smelled like summer and she crinkled her eyes in relaxation. The sound of cicadas was coming from the garden outside and there was something sweetly nostalgic about it. She raised her eyes looked at her companion smiling congenially. All in all her life was very strange, always had been, but the last few years had certainly exceeded her expectations.

And it all had begun with the birth of her daughter.

She remembers crying when Sarada was born. She had felt small, alone and quite lost. But most of all she remembers being pissed, fire-breathingly earth-shatteringly pissed, even when delivering the afterbirth. Anger had come easily, but she was better off angry than sad. It was not the first time she thought Sasuke was an asshole but it was the first time that she truly and profoundly meant it. 

She remembers blood, pain, screams and Karin’s pinched and worried face floating in front of her like a ghost of a life she never quite lived. They were in the wilderness, in a shack in the middle of nowhere, and it was an unseasonably cold night of March. Outside the rain was pouring and, as another contraction hit her, she longed for Shizune and Tsunade, for her hospital, for Konoha. She was still mentally cursing Sasuke.

Sarada came to the world far away from Fire Country; she was born perfectly healthy, angry and howling her little lungs out at the indignity of it all. She clearly took after her mother in that. Meanwhile, Sakura felt like a great big stubborn and deflated idiot for having gallivanted around during her last trimester, trying to find a husband that didn’t particularly care to be found, to announce the impending birth of their child.

But Sasuke simply was what he had always been.

_‘_ _Yes. An asshole, a really big and mean one’_ , supplied her brain helpfully. So yes, he was an asshole, but he was one asshole she had willingly married, so maybe the biggest asshole in this whole debacle was herself. 

_'Go figure, one can’t get some slack even when pregnant or post-partum.’_ Nevertheless, Sasuke wasn’t there and she wasn’t really surprised, even though an ever tinier lamenting part of her had expected better from him, especially when his daughter was concerned.

She had gone back to Konoha, with a tiny bundle in her arms, privately feeling like one of the stupidest women alive. The name Uchiha was unexpectedly heavy, and it felt like a boulder that was embedded on her back, woven in the red and white fan stitched on her clothes, its weight getting heavier and heavier with every second that passed, with every step she took inside her village. A symbol of something she wasn’t sure she knew.

Everything became clearer after she brought her little girl to Naruto. She had gone to introduce her daughter to her team, or what remained of it anyway, and it ended with her nearly levelling his house when he told her the truth. He told her of Itachi, of Obito, of the massacre and the failed coup d’état. 

_'How unexpectedly cruel the Third had been’_. She wondered what Tsunade would have done had she been in Hiruzen Sarutobi's place, she wondered what Kakashi would have done, what Naruto would have done. Maybe she was better off not knowing.

Still, she hadn’t known the truth about the massacre, about Itachi, about the Uchiha. And no one thought to tell her until after she gave birth to the newest member of what was, apparently, a cursed clan. She should have throttled them all and be done with it. Again she felt annoyed, betrayed and excluded by the men who professed themselves as her friends and family. The Uchiha were her family now, had been for a while, and she hadn’t known a lick about them. Out of the loop of team 7, even when it concerned her own husband and daughter. _‘Assholes, the lot of them.’_

She was a woman that had to singlehandedly take care of a newborn child, and in her more morose moments she’d tell Kakashi that team 7 had been an exercise in futility and that he would have probably done the world a lot more good had he failed them all in the bell test all those years ago. Some days she would feel like a despondent seventeen-year-old girl, one who liked to wallow in her own pity.

_‘To hell with that’_ , she would think each and every time, she was a mother now; she had responsibilities, especially so if the man she married didn’t grow a pair and help her raise their child together. Even if the truth about the massacre and the Uchiha plagued her sleep many a night a week, her days were busy with nappies and breastfeeding. Life had to go on and she was a singularly stubborn woman.

_‘But Gods please, don’t let Sarada get entangled with all of this. I want my daughter to grow up healthy, happy and free to be whoever she wants to be.’_ She remembers praying at night during those first few months. They had been the hardest, but Sakura was more bull-headed than anyone would give her credit for, so she would silently add _‘Or I go and break the faces, necks and bones of those responsible.’_

* * *

When Sarada was one year old she started seeing them – her family she supposes – in her dreams, or maybe they were hallucinations. The nightmares she had had about the massacre left their place to one on one conversations with the members of the clan that she now belonged to. They seemed surprisingly self-aware, very nagging and too real for her own liking.

In the beginning, she spent a long time berating the lot of them for their monumentally stupid decisions, but she spent almost as much time crying for, and in some case with, them for their tragedy and the unfairness of it all. They all seemed to much prefer her anger to her tears and histrionics, and truth to be told so did she.

She wasn’t at all certain of the whys and hows, but along the way and along the years, they became a family for her, a dysfunctional one to be fair, but a family nonetheless.

Maybe they were manifestations of the unexpressed feelings of abandonment she felt towards a husband that never came home that manifested through her hallucinating his family members. Or maybe she was really communicating with the ghosts of the departed Uchiha clan members through her dreams. Still, at this point she wasn’t too keen to know, she rather liked things this way, waking up to pastries and conversation in a nebulous part of a compound that hadn’t existed for more than a decade.

Nevertheless, she wouldn’t put something like haunting her dreams past them after all. _' Wily foxes the lot of them, even from beyond the grave'_.

Sometimes the one she met was Mikoto. She had cried with the woman more than once, other times they spoke companionably of Sarada, of her bruises and her smiles, of her laughter and her tears. Children were tough, they told each other but love was such an integral part of who and what they were. Mikoto was a terribly good woman albeit one that had committed treason, and Sakura liked her very much. She quite suspected her mother-in-law felt the same.

Once or twice it had been Fukagu; those meetings were moderately tense: he was much like his younger son, stern and brooding. Still, Sakura refused to be cowed, sat straight and primly spoke of the achievements of his granddaughter. He was proud, even if he probably lacked the face musculature to show that by the way of smiling, but she knew he was and that was enough for her.

Sometimes it was Madara. She had thrown tables, chairs, decorations and a sandal or two at him at the beginning. Threatened emasculation and bodily harm, while he laughed at her face and reminded her he was dead. She replied that he should have had the decency to stay dead the first time around and that would have avoided a lot of troubles for everyone involved, herself included. Things quieted down considerably after a time, but he still got the stink eye every time the war was even vaguely mentioned.

Very rarely it was Obito. She had hugged him the first time and then proceeded to conk him on the head with as much force as she could muster without chakra while lecturing him on the stupidity of his decisions. Then she told him she hoped his girlfriend on the other side was whipping him into shape. He apologized, cried, then laughed and proceeded to tell her that, yes, most definitely Rin had been whipping him into shape and that she had given him that very same lecture almost verbatim more times than he could count. She was glad and told him that.

However more often than not the one she met was Itachi. Absurdly enough he was her favourite. Maybe it was because she saw him the most or maybe it was just that their personalities meshed well in front of a steaming cup of tea and a plate of dango. Such as it was the case now. Yes, Itachi was definitely and absolutely her favourite.

* * *

A gentle cough brought her back to the present.

She was sitting, as she had been many times before, in a tatami room, and it was probably midsummer of thereabout. The shoji were open and the engawa overlooked a beautifully kept traditional garden; everything smelled like fragrant tea and sunlight and there was a plate of freshly made dango in front of her. It was the Uchiha compound, as beautiful and as full of life as it had been many years ago.

She was kneeling in front of a low table, a cup of tea in one hand and a stick of dango in the other. The man in front of her was pensive yet relaxed as he nibbled daintily on his own snack. Pale and willowy as he had been in life, death had given him a serenity that she was imagined he had never known before. Or maybe, like everybody else, she had seen just what she wanted to see in Uchiha Itachi, a clever ruse that worked so well, too well.

If she ever met Hiruzen Sarutobi here she would give him a lecture like none before. Yet her meetings only seemed to work with the Uchiha. _‘Pity’_ , she thought _‘I would have liked to give him a piece of my mind. Itachi had been nothing but a child then’._

She smiled then, as she sipped from her cup, the nutty smell of matcha invading her nostrils and bringing her thoughts to a more pleasant subject.

“She’s going to start the Academy next week, you know? It feels only yesterday that she was a tiny bundle in my arms grinning toothlessly and looking at me with her big dark eyes. Time is flying by.”

He looked back and smiled, proudly. “She has grown so much. You did a really good job with her, she is a wonderful young girl.”

She harrumphed to cover her embarrassment “No thanks to your brother who only contributed in providing half of the genetics, but thank you.” She exhaled, only partly annoyed. “You too helped, even if you probably are only a figment of my imagination or a by-product of some peculiar form of stress deriving from this whole Uchiha family nonsense.”

“You are a brave woman, and she is a good-spirited child. I did nothing, I just lent an ear when it seemed like you needed it.”

“Ha!” She replied, “I’m a very stupid woman and not a brave one. After all, I married your brother, didn’t I? But you are right, she is a very good child.”

She raised her eyes to look at him “I wish she had known you. Hell, I wish I had known you and not just known of you. You would have been an amazing uncle. And you probably would have helped me much more than your idiot brother, who, for all intent and purposes, did a fat load of nothing.” She sighed. “Sometimes I really hate your family, even if now it’s mine too.”

Itachi snorted. Once upon a time that simple action on his part would have almost felt unbelievable to her ears. “I wouldn’t blame you for it. But I would lie if I told you I am not happy that after all, after everything, this family still endures, still lives on.”

It was her turn to snort now. “You know that I am a single mother in all but name yes? This has stopped bothering me a long time ago and I wouldn’t give up Sarada for anything. But I don’t know how, realistically, one could say that this family lives on.” Once again she looked at him in the eyes “You, who probably are a stress-induced figment of my overactive imagination, have been more of a husband than my actual one has.” Then she added morosely “How pathetic is that.” And it almost sounded like a question.

“You are easy to get along with.”

She snorted, loudly, and told him he was the first person in the whole wide world who had ever said that. “Maybe you ought to have your head checked after all Itachi. If you truly are a ghost that is”.

He stared at her for a moment, smiled, shook his head and continued “But such is my brother, with all his limitations, I think he would have wanted to good by you, but simply can’t. He probably doesn’t even know how.”

He sighed again “This is partly my fault, I too have been foolish, forgive me. As for being a figment of your imagination, I wouldn’t know what to say to that. We’ve been having this conversation for years.”

Sakura wrinkled her nose, “You were a boy, a young boy, and maybe you were foolish but you were also a victim of circumstances far bigger than yourself. You do not need my forgiveness though you already have it, you need to forgive yourself first.”

And for a moment Sakura felt older than her age. She looked youthful, maybe only slightly older than the man sitting in front of her. He looked young too, that dead man. A very interesting dichotomy to a terrifyingly larger than life aspect she thought he represented when he was alive and when she knew nothing at all of the true heartbreaking, messy and stupid story of the Uchiha.

Damn her team for letting her walk blindly into such a marriage, into a name that weighted more than the boulders of the Hokage mountain.

Still, she wasn’t seventeen anymore and being petty now wouldn’t give her much more than some passing satisfaction. She would have to be proactive with the situation; moreover, she had a daughter that needed her.

She picked up another dango.

She could disavow her name as Uchiha, but Sarada couldn’t, and this was enough to have her discard the thought. They could do this together, as a family, the two of them against the world. The two of them and maybe the growing number of ghosts or hallucinations she spent most of her sleeping hours talking to.

“You know Itachi, I’m very pleased that I found someone that I could share my passion for dango with. I would never have guessed before.” She continued mulling things over in her mind.

However, should Sarada one day decide that she wanted nothing to do with the name Uchiha, Sakura herself was ready to do everything in her power to help her. She was even willing to demolish Hashirama and Madara’s statues from the Valley of End, blindfolded too, and with one arm tied behind her back. She was her mother and she would move mountains, quite literally in her case, for her daughter’s sake. _‘And those statues were tacky anyways’._

Undaunted her eyes crossed Itachi’s again “And by the way, no matter how many times we talk about this, if the alternative is being haunted by my departed acquired relatives I’d almost prefer to be crazy and have it be done with it” She snarked back.

She knew shouldn’t be petty but deep down Sakura would always be Sakura, even if she had grown, matured and had a daughter. Some things were just too much part of her to be discarded completely.

He laughed, and so did she, the many years bleeding into some sort of familiar comradery. That was what a family should feel like. He was a good man, truly, despite everything.

“Well then, now you should go to sleep properly. You have to wake up early and help Sarada with her preparations for the Academy. I’m afraid our name is a handicap unto itself but the things you are doing with the Children’s hospital are truly amazing.”

Strange, she didn’t remember mentioning it to him, or to any other Uchiha for that matter. Good Gods, maybe he was indeed a ghost after all. She scrunched her nose one last time and bid him farewell until next time.

He was still smiling and she was still wrinkling her nose when everything suddenly became smudged and unreal and dreamlike. She would wake up hours later, in her bed and with a smile still on her face.

_‘This family is so unearthly strange. It truly is.’_

She got up, stretched, and proceeded to comb her unruly hair, then she went about to rouse her still sleeping daughter wondering who would she meet at night when she fell asleep next.

**Author's Note:**

> Welp. I would never have imagined that I would end up actually writing something, I have always been more of a reader and a lurker than a writer. And it has been nigh on 10 years since I wrote something that was not academic-related. And everything else before that was, well, in my mother tongue, which is most definitely not English. I'm still somewhat embarrassed, but I hope I have delivered something vaguely worthwhile and most importantly I hope that you enjoyed yourselves with this tiny little snippet.
> 
> And as one of those salty ass fans who detested Naruto's ending with all her might, shout out to all those amazing people that wrote amazing fics that made me want to keep on reading when all I wanted to do was cut everything that was fandom related and be done with it forever. Seriously, thank you, you rock.


End file.
